by David Suzuki
As the broadcast date approached, Knowlton called Keith to ask him how the show was going. “Which one?” Keith asked, and Knowlton replied, “You know, that one with Suzuki on science.” And with that, Knowlton had named the show—Suzuki on Science.
The program debuted in 1970. The year before, I had gone to teach a course at the University of California at Berkeley. There was still tremendous campus foment over the Free Speech Movement and Vietnam, drugs, and flower power—a glorious time to be in the Bay area. I went to Berkeley as a straitlaced professor with short hair and horn-rimmed glasses and returned to Vancouver in granny glasses, long hair, and a headband, which became my trademark.
Suzuki on Science was what was called a “talking heads” program, with me interviewing scientists—essentially radio with pictures. (I find it interesting that many radio talk shows are now filming interviews and then broadcasting them on television.) I think I got paid fifty dollars a show. Money was never an issue for me; I wanted to get ideas out to the general public. We had a tiny budget, which we hoarded by doing most of the shows in the Vancouver studio. We saved the money for two big trips, one down the east coast and one down the west coast, where we could interview scientists in top universities and research institutions. I don’t know what the ratings were, but the series developed a kind of cult following among young people who identified with the “freak” who was the host (me). I know some scientists who were outraged that a “hippie” like me was posing as a scientist on the show.
I enjoyed doing the series and was delighted to get some top scientists to share their work with the public. But there was another long-running series—The Nature of Things—that had a large and loyal audience, had a much bigger budget, and was doing the kinds of visually spectacular programs that were more appropriate for television than my talking heads. After all, television’s advantage over radio is pictures. So after two seasons, I asked for more money to produce our series or I was finished. The money never came, so I went back to working full-time in the lab. I had no regrets and no aspirations to do more shows for Tv. I had tried and done my thing on air, but research was still my great passion and my lab was doing very exciting work, so I went back at science wholeheartedly.
I had met Jim Murray and his partner, Nancy Archibald, once in Toronto. Jim was executive producer and Nancy was a producer of The Nature of Things, a series on nature, science, and technology that had been started in 1960. I didn’t realize then how competitive Jim was, and only later learned that he was checking me out as a competitor. I felt like a country bumpkin who knew nothing about serious television programming and was just dabbling in it on a show with a tiny budget.
When Jim became executive producer of a prestigious series based on the bestselling book The National Dream, about the building of the transcontinental railway, with Pierre Berton, its author, as host, Nancy took over as executive producer of The Nature of Things. The National Dream was a ratings triumph, and after it was completed, Jim created a new science series called Science Magazine, which would present shorter reports, from two to five per show.
As different producers began to put together a variety of short stories for Science Magazine, Jim realized that a host was needed to make the transition from one item to another unrelated one. He ended up offering me the job, so in 1974 I took a leave from the University of British Columbia to go to Toronto to host my first big-budget national science program. I learned one of the most important lessons about public life when I took on that position. When The National Dream became a huge success, Jim could have gone on up the corporate ladder of cBc, but his love was science and natural history, and he chose to go back to it.
I still had a big lab when I was asked to host Science Magazine, but it was exciting to think of working with a top-notch executive producer on a series with a much bigger budget than we had when I had hosted Suzuki on Science a few years earlier. As we began to film different stories, I found the process of filming, then later, editing, tedious and boring. On one of the earliest shoots for Science Magazine, we went to New Orleans to film in a lab. I was seated on a stool as the camera assistant brought in the camera and tripod and set it up. The cameraman then set about making the lab “look like a lab,” which always made me chuckle. Apparently an actual working lab that doesn’t have test tubes bubbling with different-coloured liquids doesn’t look like a real lab, at least for a television audience. As the lab was being rearranged, the soundman put a wire down my shirt and arranged the microphone, then asked me to say a few words so he could adjust the recording machine. A lighting man came in and began to set up lights that didn’t show in the shot and then adjusted the filters and the focus of the light as the cameraman directed. Finally, when all seemed right, the cameraman came up and put a light meter beside my nose, took a reading, and went back to the camera and adjusted the focus. Then he came back and took another light reading and adjusted the focus. Nothing had changed. He did it a third time, then a fourth and fifth time! Finally I said, “For Christ’s sake, shoot the damn thing!” Jim came over, grabbed my shoulder, dragged me into a side room, and shut the door. “Listen, Suzuki,” he said. “Everyone in that room is busting their ass to make you look good. And that’s not easy.”
I slunk back into the room feeling very ashamed and never, ever got up on my high horse like that again. You see, he was absolutely right. When a program is broadcast, viewers don’t say, “Wow, every shot was in focus” or “Wasn’t the lighting great?” or “The sound was so crisp.” They say, “Wasn’t Suzuki’s show great?” I get all the credit for what is the work of literally dozens of people, from researchers, writers, and secretaries to editors, publicists, and a host of others working to make programs and get them to air. I feel that way about everything I’ve done, from research in which students, postdocs, and colleagues all contribute to the work that comes out to books I’ve written and co-written and my work at the David Suzuki Foundation with its dozens of staff, hundreds of volunteers, and thousands of donors. I get an inordinate amount of credit for what is the result of the passion, commitment, and hard work of so many others. I feel an enormous responsibility to them, which is to do the very best I can in whatever I’m involved in and to be as credible and true to what I say as I can.
Science Magazine was scheduled to run for half a year in its inaugural season. It captured a younger audience and attracted 50 percent more viewers than The Nature of Things. The items were shorter and zippier, the kind young people prefer, so the series did very well. But cBc brass weren’t committed to the idea of science programs, and before we had finished broadcasting all our shows, Knowlton Nash informed us it would be a one-season series. I was devastated.
At the end of the last show, I thanked the audience for joining us, then announced matter-of-factly that this was the last of the series and said goodbye. I assumed that was it, but apparently the cBc was deluged with phone calls and letters protesting the cancellation of the series, and within a few weeks, Knowlton told us it would carry on. So don’t ever think letters and phone calls are a waste of time. They can work if there are enough of them.
The same people who produced The Nature of Things were also used for Science Magazine. After five successful seasons of Science Magazine, we agreed it would be great to combine The Nature of Things and Science Magazine into a single one-hour program, The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. Jim took over as executive producer of this new version of the series, and I felt honoured to be tied to a venerable series that had established such a high level of quality and a loyal following.
In the first year of Science Magazine, Diana Filer, a distinguished radio producer and executive, approached me with a proposal to host a brand-new one-hour science show for radio called Quirks and Quarks. I was intrigued and agreed to try.
For the first show, we attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a huge gathering of scientists that has the express purpose of communicating with
media and the public. Hundreds of scientists, from Nobel laureates to hotshot young grad students, would give talks and speak to the press. Diana would line up people to meet with me, and I’d interview one scientist after another. It was an exhausting but great way to generate more than one show’s worth of material—we could stockpile interviews and sprinkle them throughout the year. We did this every year, and these interviews continue to this day. The next year, we included interviews from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), and that practice also continues today.
Jim was always protective of my time because he didn’t want other things to distract me from his show. I knew he wasn’t happy when I accepted projects outside of The Nature of Things, although he never protested. He happened to be in Vancouver when the first program of Quirks and Quarks was to be broadcast, so I invited him over to listen to it. I was excited about and proud of what we had done, and Jim was politely complimentary as the show proceeded. But about halfway through the program, I thought some of the voices, including mine, sounded a little higher than I remembered. Sure enough, something had gone wrong, and the tape was speeding up so that by the end, everyone sounded like the Chipmunks. I was horrified, but Jim was rolling on the floor laughing, and his mirth was not without a bit of satisfaction for my comeuppance.
In the four years I hosted Quirks and Quarks, we tried all kinds of things; after all, it was new territory. I went to New York City and spent a couple of days with Isaac Asimov, renowned as a science and science-fiction writer. He was a delightful man with an incredible drive to publish. I got him to talk about different science words or fields, and he would expound for three or four minutes on each. We included one Asimov item per show. Every week we featured a physicist, Jearl Walker, from Ohio; then Harlan Ellison, another famous science-fiction writer; and Terry Dickinson, who talked about astronomy. For a couple of years, we featured inventors with new devices. But again and again, our bread and butter was exciting stories at the cutting edge of different fields. Science is fascinating to the public so long as it is jargon free.
I was once taken in completely by an interview with a “scientist” who was in fact a cBc radio producer. Posing as a researcher, he described his project to catch a gigantic prehistoric shark he believed still existed by dragging a cow through the water as bait. He sucked me right in as I pursued his ideas, until finally, when I asked if he had had any success, he quipped, “Yes, I’ve caught the biggest fish of all—you. April Fool, Dr. Suzuki.”
One of my most satisfying experiences was interviewing a British Nobel Prize–winning physiologist at the Baas meeting. He did a fine job talking about his research but then veered into a discussion of his concerns about the degradation of the human gene pool. He had no idea I was a scientist, let alone a geneticist, and I let him go on. Finally, I suggested that Walter Bodmer, an eminent geneticist at Oxford, had shown that until racism was totally eliminated, comparisons between different racial groups to determine hereditary components of intelligence couldn’t be made. I knew he would know who Bodmer was, and his pompous demeanour changed as he stood up to say he had a press-ing engagement. I didn’t let him go without first telling him that claims of a hereditary basis for racial differences in intelligence had wide-reaching social ramifications and that as a Nobel Prize winner whose words would have an enormous impact, he had a responsibility to know what he was talking about. He left very quickly.
I loved Quirks and Quarks because radio is so much more my medium than television. When I started with Suzuki on Science, we filmed in-studio with two-inch videotape. When we went on location, we shot on 16 mm film, which was expensive, and each roll allowed only ten minutes of time. So we had to get what we wanted as efficiently as possible, in contrast to radio, where I could chat away to warm up a guest and explore avenues that I hadn’t expected if any opened up. We could be funny or quirky and tell jokes because audiotape is cheap and editing is easy. For me, radio is natural and comfortable.
I am so proud to have hosted Quirks and Quarks for four years and to have shown that there is a big audience for science programs, that a science show can be funny, exciting, and relevant, and that there is always new material. Early on, a person in communications at uBc warned me that I would have a hard time finding enough stories to fill an hour of programming every week, but the reality is that I could have done an hour a night if I’d had the budget and the staff, because there was no shortage of material. My preference, though, would be for stories involving some aspect of science to be a part of programming in news and current affairs, not hived off as a special-interest area. Quirks and Quarks very quickly established a solid audience and is now a venerable part of radio programming, just as The Nature of Things has been in television.
From 1975 to 1979, I hosted both Science Magazine on television and Quirks and Quarks on radio. While I preferred doing radio, it turned out that doing weekly shows demanded my constant involvement and took much more of my time than Science Magazine did. I was still teaching at uBc and had an active research group, and I knew when we decided to amalgamate Science Magazine and The Nature of Things that the hour-long program would be a bigger burden. The audience for The Nature of Things would be much larger, and I felt we could explore issues more deeply, so I reluctantly chose to leave Quirks and Quarks. But I remain delighted and proud that it is such a big part of CBC’S radio offerings and has had very good hosts.
In my early years with The Nature of Things, our main competitors were the Canadian private network CTV and the American networks CBS, NBC, and ABC. I learned that ratings mattered even though cBc is a public broadcaster, but The Nature of Things had a good audience average—well over a million a night. Over the years, as cable and satellite dishes brought more choice to viewers and remote controls made them more skittish, our audiences began to fall. And in competing for viewers, we had to be louder, sexier, more sensational, and faster paced.
I always decried the short attention span we catered to on television. If nature needs time to reveal her secrets, I would say, why don’t we give her some of that time on our programs, putting in “dead air” instead of trying to pack in more jolts per minute? Give the viewer an understanding of nature’s pace.
I found out that my own notion of time had changed when, in 1992, we considered doing a program on the Earth Summit in Rio. In 1972, the first un conference on the environment had been held in Stockholm, and The Nature of Things had done a program on it. So I got out the show from the archives to screen and was amazed to see well-known experts like Paul Ehrlich and Barbara Ward interviewed as talking heads for three to four minutes each! Today we would never have a talking head for more than twenty or thirty seconds. But what was shocking to me was that I kept thinking, “This is too slow,” or even, “Boring.” My demand for more information in shorter segments meant that my own intake of information had sped up, and today, watching how young people “multitask” and tweet and watch segments of films and listen to just parts of songs, I see the demand for even faster delivery of more information.
Well, that’s a quick run-through of some of my experiences in the media. It never occurred to me that I would become a celebrity. I thought I was merely acting as an agent to transmit information and ideas, but from week to week, viewers don’t remember what shows were about or what the details were on each program. I often meet people who say, “Oh, I watched your show last week,” and when I ask what it was about, they can’t remember. What they do recall is that it was my show—that is, they remember me.
When I was doing Science Magazine, feminism became a hot topic, and a new show was started called Some of My Best Friends Are Men. It got a lot of money and publicity, and I complained to Jim that I didn’t see why we never got as much support yet science was so important. Jim’s response was prescient: “The important thing is to hang in and stay on air. Series like this come and go, but we’re here to stay for the long haul.” He was right, and Some of My Best Friends Are Men was so
on gone, but we kept on air and I was the constant on the series. In hindsight, I see the enormous gift hosting The Nature of Things was. Not only did I become a familiar figure after years of hosting the series, I had a platform to present other shows that Jim and I passionately believed in.
{seven}
FAME AND HEROES
MY DARLINGS,
I wonder if any of you have ever heard of Andy Warhol. He was a famous pop artist in the 1960s and ’70s who made huge works of art depicting Marilyn Monroe and Camp-bell’s soup cans, among other subjects. In 1968 he said that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Today, as most of you know far better than I do, postings on Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and other social media can go viral and quickly reach a huge global audience. But what titillates or interests us may disappear from our radar within hours, maybe even minutes.
So what does it mean to be famous? I know some of your friends think your bompa is famous just because I’m on Tv, but that kind of fame is fleeting. It’s also incredibly superficial, based on one aspect of the person that people choose to focus on. There are people who are famous for being famous, like Paris Hilton, or for having a large derriere, like Kim Kardashian. Simply because I have been on television for years as the host of The Nature of Things, I am recognized by people who may know that I am a scientist or an environmentalist. But that person the public sees week after week is not me. Of course, it is my body and my face they see, but the personality that is projected is a creation of the medium—from the words I recite from memory or read from a teleprompter to the clothes I wear and the way I move and the inflection of my voice.